I removed a bunch of wildcard paths from rsnapshot.conf's exclude, and suddenly tonight my backup ran in a few minutes instead of taking over a day like it usually does.
Interesting, I've been looking off and on for at least the better part of a year for ways to lighten the load of rsnapshot's under-the-hood rsync backup commands, which reliably took up about half my CPU power almost continuously, and never found this tip before. You can see, plenty of wildcard paths removed, plus a few other things.
Here's a diff, rsnapshot.conf before changes (<) vs after (>):
< verbose 1
---
> verbose 4
120c120
< loglevel 2
---
> loglevel 4
143a144,146
> rsync_short_args -Wa
> #-W is transfer whole files without prescan, recommended for performance by https://serverfault.com/questions/639458/rsync-taking-100-of-cpu-and-hours-to-complete
> #NOTE: if you set the above short args, include 'a' manually! It's needed!
174,177c177,180
< exclude '*log.*.gz'
< exclude '*log.gz'
< exclude 'home/*/tmp'
< exclude '/tmp'
---
> exclude 'log.*.gz'
> exclude 'log.gz'
> exclude 'home/[Logged In Users Only]/tmp'
> #exclude '/tmp'
178a182,184
> exclude '/root/downloads'
> exclude '/root/.claude'
> exclude '/root/.mozilla'
191,201c197,217
< exclude '/dev/*'
< exclude '/home/*/.gvfs'
< exclude '/home/*/.mozilla/firefox/*/Cache'
< exclude '/home/*/.cache/chromium'
< exclude '/home/*/.thumbnails'
< exclude '/media/*'
< exclude '/mnt/*'
< exclude '/proc/*'
< exclude '/sys/*'
< exclude '/tmp/*'
< exclude '/home/*/.local/share/Trash'
---
> #exclude '/dev/*'
> #was exclude '/home/*/.gvfs'
> exclude '.gvfs'
> exclude '.mozilla/firefox/*/Cache'
> exclude '.cache/chromium'
> exclude '.thumbnails'
> #last 3 were
> #exclude '/home/*/.mozilla/*/Cache'
> #exclude '/home/*/.cache'
> #exclude '/home/*/.thumbnails'
> #
> #exclude '/home/*/.mozilla/firefox/*/Cache'
> #exclude '/home/*/.cache/chromium'
> #exclude '/home/*/.thumbnails'
> #exclude '/media/*'
> #exclude '/mnt/*'
> #exclude '/proc/*'
> #exclude '/sys/*'
> #exclude '/tmp/*'
> exclude '.local/share/Trash'
> #was exclude '/home/*/.local/share/Trash'
203,213c219,234
< exclude '/var/run/*'
< exclude '/var/lock/*'
< exclude '/lib/modules/*/volatile/.mounted'
< exclude '/var/cache/apt/archives/*'
< exclude '/home/*/.mozilla/*/Cache'
< exclude '/home/*/.cache'
< exclude '/home/*/.thumbnails'
< exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/*'
< exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/data/cache/*'
< exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/.cursor-server/*'
< exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/.wp-cli/*'
---
> exclude '/var/run'
> #was exclude '/var/run/*'
> exclude '/var/lock'
> #was exclude '/var/lock/*'
> #exclude '/lib/modules/*/volatile/.mounted'
> exclude '/var/cache/'
> #was exclude '/var/cache/apt/archives/*'
> exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]'
> exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/data/cache'
> exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/.cursor-server'
> exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/.wp-cli'
> #last 4 were:
> #exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/public_html/genEmail logs/*'
> #exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/public_html/FrRSS47/data/cache/*'
> #exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/.cursor-server/*'
> #exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/.wp-cli/*'
224c245,246
< exclude_file /home/[Logged In Users Only]/debug.log
---
> #exclude_file /home/[Logged In Users Only]/debug.log
> #above commented out because seemed to cause problems if debug.log didn't exist. Test it out.
